Better way to swap elements in a list?

Question

I have a bunch of lists that look like this one:

l = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]

I want to swap elements as follows:

fi         


        

Answer 1

Here a single list comprehension that does the trick:

In [1]: l = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]

In [2]: [l[i^1] for i in range(len(l))]
Out[2]: [2, 1, 4, 3, 6, 5, 8, 7, 10, 9]

The key to understanding it is the following demonstration of how it permutes the list indices:

In [3]: [i^1 for i in range(10)]
Out[3]: [1, 0, 3, 2, 5, 4, 7, 6, 9, 8]

The ^ is the exclusive or operator. All that i^1 does is flip the least-significant bit of i, effectively swapping 0 with 1, 2 with 3 and so on.